


What Rhymes with Circadian?

by bluesyturtle



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Author Is Sleep Deprived, Crack, Drabble Collection, Fix-It, Gen, I Don't Even Know, Season/Series 03 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-10
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2018-04-08 16:09:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4311726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I write these for my wonderful sexy fren assholehustler while not sleeping. They're tidied up a bit from where they were originally posted on Tumblr, but just to make them more accessible, I suppose.</p><p>1. Catacombs - Hannibal beneath the church before Will forgives him<br/>2. Cassandra - Will and Abigail walking on the tracks after the train<br/>3. Conjoined - Will and Hannibal in the gallery, you know what I mean</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Catacombs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hustler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hustler/gifts).



He knows his way front and back through these labyrinthine corridors. The forlorn curl of incense and faint traces of decay in the air burn in his nose, familiar yet not.

His body would have him believe that he’s famished, but he’s hungered for more and glutted himself at a far greater cost. Shadows suit him, even if the light had come to learn his presence, too.

A long time he waits, touching the time-blackened walls and inhaling the ancient dust which clings to skeletons. Neither action is defensible in the slightest. But rules exist for exceedingly pragmatic reasons, and if they protect against nothing, then they themselves are unfounded. He can no more take the husks of these corpses into himself than he can be absorbed by them in turn. The stalemate puts him in a foul mood.

Of course, one _could_ argue that he’s been out of sorts since the mildly unfortunate incident of Antony Dimmond’s death. One would be perfectly within the bounds of reason to suppose just such a thing.

Regret is not a taste he savors on his palate, but it clings to him. It smacks of several complex tastes that he’d tried–and failed–to purge from his mind.

He would have to be a fool to think he could forgo them. Nothing ever really stops, not once he’s seen it, heard it, felt it, lived it. No betrayal ever stings less. No joy that blurs the sharp edges of the world ever diminishes. No love ever fades.

The betrayal aches more severely. The joy burns brighter. The love cuts him deeper.

And that had been the point, hadn’t it? To leave a cut as deep, to sear the joy in like a brand of ownership, to plant just a single seed of treachery. Gardens, fields–vast acres of land–grow lush and ripe and heavy with the bounty of a single fruit, multiplied upon infinity.

It had been his intention to maim, not kill. But the trap he set for one caught two.

Will and Abigail. Hannibal and Will.

Three, perhaps: a trinity forged in blood, mutilation, and kindling. The sacred, immaculate number three had come to mean them and their family, a possibility for light and life that never would have been. He should have known it wouldn’t allow him to hold fast to his prizes, his living trophies, his perhaps, his maybe, his someday.

Light and life allowed him only because he twisted himself to fit their paradigm. Even darkness and death permitted a mere variation of a variation of himself.

Somewhere in between light and death, and life and darkness–at the very core of a new, shivering dichotomy that could break the world if enough practitioners arose to worship at its shrine–Will found him. He had found him and he had reminded him how little his upright, civilized world suited him.

Precisely because it suited Will about the same.

Life bestowed a charming facsimile of the object he had chosen to love in the form of Antony Dimmond: Antony Dimmond whose eyes glistened and followed him at every turn and who would have lavished adoration without requiring much, if anything, in return. Indeed, Fortune had smiled. She smiled and performed Minos’ mistake. She gave him less than what he knew to be his right. Will would be utterly loathe to discover the maudlin, possessive turn of Hannibal’s thoughts, always having been so much his own person.

He would, however, appreciate the poetic beauty of Antony Dimmond as Asterion, the macabre and grotesque Minotaur fashioned into the semblance of a human heart, the product of so much treachery and deception. Antony Dimmond had, after all, presumed to fill that role when it was not his to take. A replica in life and a replica in death.

Poetic. Beautiful. A bit of tawdry theatre to go with the acrid flavor of sentiment that stains his tongue still. More of that regret that has no place in his mind and certainly not in his heart. He sends it away further, buries it deeper in the gnarled spire of a bent tower in his memory palace. He would burn it if he could to destroy the pestilence that is his guilt, his remorse, his overwhelming sense of failure. But nothing ever goes away. It only intensifies to the point of collapsing on itself, on him. He is God and he is the caved in roof and he is His dead supplicants, a machine fully self-sufficient and self-destructing.

He wanders the halls of the catacombs that he knows so well, breathing in expired life and running his fingers over the flickering flames that dance at the ephemeral ends of blackened wicks.

When Will enters into the maze, a knowing or unwitting Theseus, and Hannibal’s methodical stalking evolves into a dance. They are not together, but they are no longer _hunter_ and _hunted_. For a long time while they evade each other, Hannibal wonders, earnestly, if either of them could boast enough to call himself a hunter of the other. The dizziness in his head parallels falling, but he fell quite some time ago.

He fell before he ever knew Will. Will leveled him when they met.

But as he chases Hannibal now, it does not smack of a hunt. It rings of pursuit, definitely, but the reward threatens to be far of a far more wholesome brand than the chase and the kill combined. Because he has no idea what on earth that could mean for him, for him or Will, the prospect excites him.

In this place surrounded by the embodiment of life’s singular guarantee, with the darkness for his mantel and the feeble candlelight as his pulse, he feels like a man pursued by a lover.

It is a taste so simple yet so intricate that he must stop when he hears Will call for him again.

_Speak,_ Hannibal commands him without speaking.

“I forgive you.”

_I wonder if that’s true, Will._

He thinks about it until the scent down in the tunnels becomes his and his alone, only traces of Will left behind in the darkness.


	2. Cassandra

He is battered. She is bloodied.

It’s his fault, as most things wrong in his life today tend to be. Abigail walks ahead of him on the tracks with her arms out to either side like she’s concerned she’ll fall. He’s curious whether that’s his caution or if it’s hers. At the end, when she ended, he’s not sure she had much of anything left to call her own. This person with him is a ghost in more ways than just the one, but when she smiles his heart swells to bursting. When she laughs part of him hums and glows, revitalized. And that’s wrong. It’s so wrong. She is his fault, too, as she is.

He wouldn’t trade this dismantled version of her that can still smile for the unreal, pristine Abigail Hobbs that shadowed him in Italy. He wouldn’t. Possibly because he can’t. Guilt prevents him from trying. Something near to love but perhaps closer to endearment stops him from looking too closely at his guilt.

“I can’t believe she pushed you off a train.”

Abigail turns to walk backwards, peering behind Will at the stag trailing after him. Will doesn’t look. The beast vanishes when he does, but he can hear it breathing, walking, alive, and robust at his back. He doesn’t ask himself what that means. He can’t.

“They call him Jeremy, you know.”

“Who does?” he asks, finding that his words don’t sound half as strained as they did when he first got to his feet. His nose and jaw ache, but his ability to speak remains unimpaired. Abigail doesn’t need his voice to hear his question. “Jeremy?”

“The stag,” Abigail tells him, smiling in the moonlight with strips of blood dried across her face like errant strands of hair. “They call him Jeremy the Nightmare Stag.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Well, remember how we said there might be other worlds?” Abigail slows, allows him to pass her up, and walks half a step behind him on the tracks. “And that they might treat us better than this one?”

Will hums. He remembers.

“I went looking.”

Abigail’s voice is playful, full of mischief and youth. Will’s chest burns. One of his ribs is cracked. He tells himself that’s why it hurts so much to breathe when she speaks to him, sounding like this–sounding more like a girl than a woman. They took that from her, he and Hannibal did. Her chance to grow into her own real person dissolved because of them and because of her father.

Somewhere in one of those worlds they don’t live in, Louise Hobbs has rescued her daughter from their killers. Somewhere, he hopes.

“Well? Aren’t you gonna ask?”

“Hmm? Ask what?”

“The other worlds,” Abigail says, bumping him with her shoulder and making room for herself beside him on the tracks. “Jeremy the Nightmare Stag.”

“Oh. Yeah. Who named him Jeremy?”

“I didn’t go back that far, to the start of it. I mostly just fooled around with the pairings, and um, you’re obviously one of the more popular characters featured in them.”

“Pairings, what does that mean?”

“ _Pairings,_ ” Abigail repeats with a flick of her eyebrows that he sees and feels in his own face. “Sexual pairings. Sometimes you’re even a woman, or he is, or you both are. It’s fascinating stuff.”

He thinks he has a concussion on top of already clearly being delusional. Two hallucinations in one night don’t bode well. It’s a long walk to wherever he gets first.

“All right…?”

“We’re paired up sometimes,” she informs him matter-of-factly.

He blinks at her.

“Yeah, I thought so, too. People feel how they feel, though. One of them had you, me, and Hannibal all in the same one–and another had you, Hannibal, and Dr. Du Maurier. Or you, Hannibal, and someone called Matthew Brown, who sounds incredibly shady by the way–”

“Abigail. Slow…what? What are you…I don’t?”

“You’re confused, I get it. I was, too, at first. It’s…well, it’s a whole other world. Which is what we wanted, right? A different place where things happened differently.”

“Well you’re selling the porn a lot more than you are the rest of it.”

“I kind of haven’t really read the other stuff yet.” She shrugs and shows her hands at his heavily judgmental glance. “You get sucked in by the graphic stuff, it’s just more immediate! I’ll get to the deep stuff and report back, don’t worry. There’s definitely enough of it to keep me busy. How long are we gonna be walking anyway?”

Will scans the railroad tracks ahead of them, blearily gazes over his shoulder where “Jeremy the Nightmare Stag” is not, and faces forward. He has no idea. Abigail doesn’t repeat her question.

She’s gone when he looks. He doesn’t hear the stag either.

He puts one foot in front of the other and shakes his head, trying to get the seedlings Abigail left out of his thoughts. They persist, though.

That he thinks about it, about his name strung together with all those other names and how his and Hannibal’s tend to cling to each other across the board like magnetized objects, is nobody’s fault but his own. He walks alone until the sun rises. The stag noses him off the tracks when another train comes rumbling along. He has half a thought to try and catch it, but he’s tired still and he doesn’t want to lose his legs to a locomotive somewhere in Europe. He just doesn’t.

Instead he steps back onto the tracks once the train has passed and keeps walking. He thinks about other worlds and wonders how many of them Abigail, Beverly, and Bella survive. He wonders how many of them kill Hannibal to protect the rest–whether he’s the one who’s made to do it and if he ever falls on his sword after.

Or if Hannibal does, after killing him.


	3. Conjoined

“Shall we, Will?”

He almost stands right there, ready to run out of the gallery and into the street with no further thought for the knife in his pocket. His heart is rent in two slanted directions. Jack’s words are in his head just as fresh as the memory of Chiyoh’s hands pushing him, flinging him, gone. They gave him the same message: all he could tolerate was violence. If struggle was his language, he used his pain to communicate. He used the pain of others to connect.

That’s always been true. It was why he had a job–why Jack wouldn’t let him say no to the work they did.

He almost sends Hannibal out in front of him like a man to be executed. Point of fact, he tells himself various times that he could do it if he put his mind to it. But it’s never worked in his favor, keeping his hand hidden from Hannibal’s gaze. Hiding himself from Hannibal only ever got him maimed. It cost others their lives. Hannibal is already beginning to stand when Will fumbles his hand into his pocket, producing the silver that makes him Judas. He’s tired of betrayal.

The knife makes a loud, sharp sound on the bench. Hannibal stops mid-stride to stare at it.

“Had you thought to collect a bounty today, Will?”

Will clasps his hands together and leaves the knife beside him. Miserable, he says, “What I want from you can’t be achieved with that. Just like what you want from me wouldn’t have been achieved by my death.”

He hears Hannibal breathe in and out. After a time, he turns to face the door while Will peers up at the painting from between his fingers.

“I don’t want to surprise you again,” Will tells him, meaning it.

Nothing is worth that anymore. Hannibal taught him the hard way, and Will, not one to ever waste a difficult lesson, learned.

“You said we were conjoined,” Hannibal observes slowly, carefully.

It’s his default tone for conversations such as these. Veiled land mines lurk around every turn of speech and sunken metaphors lie in wait to ambush him. In other words, it’s an ordinary day, probably a Monday, though Will doesn’t actually know.

He missed this, with Hannibal. He craved it.

Jack could never understand. It was too simple a need and too base a desire for an upright human being like Jack Crawford who could still be perplexed at the turns in people’s minds.

“I wanted to cut you out of me,” Will confesses for Hannibal’s benefit.

Hannibal, who must be allowed to gloat in the splendor of his success, his power, his triumph. In the artistry and poetry of it. The full circle they’ve made in this place, having seen all that they’ve seen together.

“Had I not been gratuitous enough that night in Baltimore?” Hannibal asks, sounding flippant and looking it, the ass.

Honestly.

“You decide everything.” Will stands, the knife behind him and Hannibal in front of him but still looking out the open door. “You always have.”

“Have I decided this for you?” Hannibal gestures behind Will at the knife.

“Yes.”

And that, even if it’s only for the smallest flicker of a moment, shakes a rift through Hannibal’s defenses. His brow twitches into a perplexed furrow for that one tenuous instant that he almost can’t trace with his eyes. But as quickly as it is gone from Hannibal’s face, Will’s gratification at having seen it dissipates.

Ever the glutton for punishment, he reaches out with his hand, looking for more if Hannibal will give it to him. He’s wanted more for what feels like ages now. His whole life, perhaps. Before, and after Hannibal. All of it. The great blurring, shattering-unshattered teacup of their lives, their worlds, their universe. Four legs, four arms, two heads. And one…other element that may have been a soul at one point or may never have been anything more than the essence of one.

“What do you want, Will?”

The words are uttered so softly, so gently that the tenor of Hannibal’s voice doesn’t vibrate against Will’s hand. All he feels is the moving divisions between cheek and jaw, pressing up beneath the thickest part of his thumb.

Will is tired of betrayal. He’s tired of burning for the things other people push onto him. Better to taste the fire because he danced in it, than because he was thrown into it to die.

Yet he can only whisper, “I want to go with you.”

And perhaps because this one thing is not a lie or the truth warped into manipulation, Will relaxes. He loosens his tense shoulders and presses his thumb deeper into that cheekbone. Hannibal tilts his head–Will has seen that head tilt in his dreams and imagined it while awake–and licks his lips.

“Then come with me.”

He can’t believe anything would ever be so easy with Hannibal. The knife stays behind after they have gone, but God still brings the roof down over their heads in the form of a bullet that falls from the sky.


End file.
